


The Corporal's Portrait

by applejax95



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, M/M, ereri, erevi - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-24
Updated: 2014-03-24
Packaged: 2018-01-16 21:22:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1362175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/applejax95/pseuds/applejax95
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Levi says a few words to Eren the morning before he dies, and the memories haunt him in his next life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Corporal's Portrait

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Ereri Reincarnation AU Idea](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/41848) by hemademefeellikeihadaheart. 



“Corporal, if we all get reborn, what are you going to do?”

Levi ceased dusting his shelves for a moment in response to the question. If Eren had been more alert, he would have winced and awaited a harsh reaction from his superior, or he might not have even asked such a sentimental question to begin with. Instead, he was sitting upright on the corporal’s bed with his sleepwear draped lazily on his body, sleepiness still present in his bright green eyes as he stared at the wood paneled floor in front of him. 

“I never thought about it,” Levi murmured, moving his paused dusting mop back into action.

It was a blatant lie. He’d thought about it a million times, if not more. What could be important to him in a world that wasn’t swarmed in giant, man eating beasts that threatened to extinguish humanity at any given time? When he did, he found himself sitting by himself for hours in a fruitless haze, dreaming about what he could do if he wasn’t constantly struggling in this disaster. 

So he shoved the ideas away. He didn’t want to spend his life fantasizing about something better than this shit-storm he lived in. If he sincerely started to believe the lie that he would have another chance, that this cruel world wasn’t his only option, what motivation would he have to fight to save it? This world was all he had now, he can’t give up hope. He has to eliminate the titans, so that the many bloody deaths of his comrades wouldn’t be in vain. It would be selfish to dream of anything else.

“I wanna see you again,” Eren admitted, wrapping the blanket around his shoulders and covering his mouth and chin. 

Despite only the corporal’s backside being visible to Eren, Levi retained a passive mask over his face as an arrow pierced his heart.

“Why?” he muttered in a tone that he hoped made Eren think he honestly didn’t give a shit about the answer.

“I don’t think... I don’t think I’d be happy in a world without the people that,” Eren hesitated, beginning to become more aware as his thoughts trailed directly from his mind and out his mouth, “people that mattered, I guess.”

“You’re assuming you’d remember them,” Levi said coldly, not bothering to face the boy, “I don’t need a next life anyway, and even if I was reborn, I don’t need to see you again. Right now is enough.”

Eren waited an uncomfortable amount of time before mumbling a small agreement and Levi heard a rustling on the bed as Eren decided to go back to sleep. He then muttered something so quietly that Levi was certain he wasn’t meant to hear it, but for some reason he didn’t get angry.

“Then I guess I won’t see you anyway.”

***

Levi woke in a cold sweat with regret coursing through his veins. He felt the agony close over his heart as the visions reminded him of what he knew had been the last private conversation he’d had with the lover he’d never met. But why did he feel so much pain? Those dreams couldn’t have been real. That’s what everyone would have told him, at least.

But for some reason, ever since he could remember, he would dream of war and giants and blood, but sparkling among those tragedies were the reveries of a green-eyed, messy-haired brat. His face was the clearest of all those he could remember, which was probably due to the intimacy between them. He lit the oil lamp he kept by his bed. 

The year was 1830. Levi had lived his whole life peacefully, at least in comparison to his dreams. Anytime he ever spoke to anyone of the visions, which was very scarce, he was written off and called absurd. He didn’t know of anyone else who had the same problems as him, so he kept them to himself. It wouldn’t be a problem if the dreams didn’t make him he feel as though he led a shallow, meaningless existence, taking solace only in his career as a talented painter. People constantly praised him for his skill, success and money, but no one in this life seemed as important to him as the people he’d spent his nights fighting huge monsters with.

He sat at the edge of his bed and let out a bitter laugh as the irony of his last conversation with Eren ran through his mind. He’d seen before what happened to Eren the next day. He didn’t want to think about his mangled, red-stained body on the ground before him. His stomach twisted nauseatingly and he put his face in his hands.

_I probably won’t see you anyway._

He never questioned if Eren was reborn; there was no conceivable suggestion in his mind that Eren didn’t deserve a second chance, and since there was no way of being certain, he forced himself to believe Eren would be breathing and living happily again. He might have gone insane if he didn’t believe that. Maybe the boy was halfway across the world, or he’d been born in a timeline hundreds of years away from Levi. Gods, he hoped Eren didn’t remember him. He didn’t want the last words he spoke, unfiltered without the prying eyes of the scouting legion, to sting him the way they did for him. If Eren’s life were tainted with memories of the Corporal, he would want him to be at peace with what happened.

_I don’t need to see you again._

But, God, he did.

Levi took his face out of his hands and stared at them. He needed to see him so badly, but it seemed impossible. What could he do to contact someone from so many years ago?

Eren’s beaming face flashed through his mind.

Levi looked up at the painting easel that was across the bedroom from him. He stood and crossed the floor, and grabbed a utensil to begin immediately, with only the lamp on his bed as the source of light in the room.'

He didn’t care how long it took. He would see him again. He would recreate the pouting mouth, the striking eyes, the clumps of brunette hair and every little flawless imperfection on his face. Hoping beyond all hope that it would get the attention it needed in order for a great sum of people to see it, Levi began to work on what would be the most important work of his life.

***

Eren was scribbling with his own pencil in an old notebook he used for his art class. It was dim in the yellow-walled classroom, with the blinds blocking out what light they could so that the students could see the images that the projector displayed on the pull-down screen.

The teacher was droning on about some great artists from the romantic period, and Eren clearly wasn’t paying attention, and the teacher had given up trying to make him. But one word in the slurs of his educator seemed to grab his ear between thumb and finger and force his attention.

“…French painter, who went by the name ‘Levi,’ refusing to be called by his real name…”

Eren gaped at the teacher for a moment, but no one noticed. He figured he was being ridiculous, but he never stopped jumping up when he heard the name that haunted the nightly memories that everyone insisted were figments of his imagination. The dreams consisted of enormous, frightening faces that filled him with so much unexplained rage he normally pushed them out of his mind, and many faces of his friends, family and comrades. One also went by the name Levi, the one the teacher had mentioned, but Eren knew his faint hopes would be squashed under the foot of reality and the improbable chance that his dreams were real. Even if they were, this Levi was probably just another quack painter that he didn’t care about.

Eren went back to doodling in his notebook. He had what he considered no talent in art, but he found it difficult to keep his anxious hands from doing something at any given time. A few minutes passed before someone grabbed his attention again.

“Dude, Jaeger, check this out,” a boy named Arnold urged as he leaned over and gently bumped his elbow against Eren’s right arm.

“What?” Eren murmured, stilling his pencil and glancing at the boy next to him.

The kid nodded toward the projector. Before Eren looked at it, he noticed a redheaded girl behind Arnold staring at him. Eren looked around, and everyone in his perceivable vision was also staring at him with dumbfounded expressions. What the hell?

He looked forward and his vision tunneled to the portrait on the screen. It was a painting of a boy that exactly resembled Eren in his ripe age of 15. Every little detail of his face had been fabricated with paint, from his disheveled mess of hair to the tiny sun spots that sprinkled his cheeks. Eren’s jaw dropped.

“Who painted that?” Eren demanded.

“Levi,” the teacher sighed, “If you were paying attention you would have known that.”

“What else do you know about him?” Eren asked eagerly, showing no detectable hint at regret for his lack of interest earlier.

“Oh, um,” the teacher stammered, racking her brain, “Well, he was a little interesting. He was very disconnected to most of the people he knew and kept a journal that people discovered after he died that said he suffered from vivid hallucinations of things he referred to as _‘Les Iapeti’_ or what we would call ‘Titans.’ He treasured this portrait, _‘Cette vie ne fut jamais assez,’_ more than any of his other works, and wouldn’t explain why.”

Eren’s heart stopped. His mind flashed to bloody battles with the enormous creatures, the feeling of flying at top speed through the air, and he feeling of warm skin against his as he gasped the name that preoccupied his dreams. Before he could create another reaction, tears welled up in his eyes.

“Are you all right?” the teacher asked as she raised an eyebrow.

“Erm,” Eren mumbled, rubbing his face to unconvincingly disguise his hands wiping away the dampness in his eyes, “I just—That’s really cool.”  
The teacher blinked at him a couple times, then lost interest after a few moments along with the rest of the class, excluding Eren. There was no way he and the boy in the painting could have been connected, unless they were some distant relative.

But Eren knew otherwise.

He was glad that had been the last class of the day, because he immediately shoved everything in his book bag, which he didn’t bother to zip up, and flew down the hallways as a few of his papers abandoned his conquest and floated to the floor. He called to the people he considered friends that he had ‘something important’ to do when they tried to catch him on his way out, though he’d admit to himself later that the urgency he felt might have been a little too unrestrained. He sprinted down the street to his home, threw the door open and tossed his bag to the floor. He raced through the living room and up the stairs, two at a time, finally reaching his room before he whipped open his laptop.

He slammed the keys as he typed the name of the portrait into Google Images, and several pictures popped up. He picked the first one that was associated with an art-related website. He opened the high resolution image in another tab.

Eren looked over the screen wide-eyed as it displayed the painting in great detail, brushing the depiction that Levi had touched so many years ago. His illustration was covered in hues of dark blues and purples and blacks. Eren was dressed in a dark coat, light trousers and a dark cravat. He sat in a mahogany chair with a matching table that had a giant crack running down the center, half in the portrait and half not visible. Peeking through the curtains was a brilliant, swirling night sky, with a black circle depicting a new moon. He was posing with his right elbow on the table, holding a bright red rose between his thumb and index finger, as if he were brushing the petals against his lips. His green eyes stuck out of the picture astonishingly, only rivalled by the brilliance of the red rose, his expression a mixture of pain and happiness with the hint of a bittersweet smile pulling at the edges of his mouth.

Eren flashed to the last conversation he’d had in his past life with Levi. He understood in that instant, the portrait was sending a memorandum to him. From what he learned from he could analyze that crack in the table was Levi’s insecurity, the curtains showed that he hid it, the dark moon was their rebirth and the rose was the message to Eren.

Warm tears ran down Eren’s cheeks and he covered his mouth to deafen the sound of a choked sob. He opened a new tab and googled the translation of the title _Cette vie ne fut jamais assez._

He smiled as more tears than he thought he was capable of creating flowed freely across his face, which had crumpled in sweet sorrow. He made a sound that could pass for ironic laughter between heavy crying breaths as he remembered the exchange of words that happened that occurred the last time he saw the corporal as his lover. The translation lit up on the screen as he wept and saved the high-rez image.

_Cette vie ne fut jamais assez: That life was never enough._

**Author's Note:**

> Based off of this prompt. http://hemademefeellikeihadaheart.tumblr.com/post/76247064642/ereri-reincarnation-au-idea
> 
> The ask for the blog wasn't open, so if you're the owner and you're really bothered by me having this up feel free to message me and I'll delete it. I loved the idea, though.


End file.
